Digby reflects on encounters with famous authors

by AnneS · Published 12/02/2026 · Updated 10/11/2025

Some Famous Authors
As a development officer in the Gloucestershire County Library Service I got in touch with local authors before Library Week. Most eminent was Laurie Lee (and the most dramatic) but, eschewing publicity, he was slow to respond. But he was a regular at Stroud Library, the nearest branch to his home in Slad, and I was tipped off: “He’s using the photocopier!” Cornered, he stood back and spread his arms and loudly proclaimed to assorted readers: “This Library was my University!” Today he’d have to say, less snappily: “ABE Books was my University, supplemented by downloads from the internet.” (And, as the internet’s been taken over by commercial interests, he’d have to qualify that: increasingly, we can no longer find half my favourite sites, or else we must pay for them. Moreover, despite popular belief, internet pages tend to have short lifespans – safer to use a biro on acid paper. The non-partisan Pew Research Center in Washington found that 38% the pages extant in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023 and that a quarter of those that were online at some point over that period have now vanished. Bye bye to your memorial in the cloud, friends, just as it was bye bye to your local library.)
Joanne Trollope couldn’t see me (brisk but cooperative on the telephone).
Colin Dexter I met, driving him to a promotional event. I asked the obvious question about TV adaptations of Morse and he said he’d been initially doubtful about changes they’d made but, wholeheartedly “You won’t catch me criticising them” – they’d made him famous, and he said he now visualised John Thaw as he was writing.
Who else? Jamila Gavin, award-winning children’s author, was the least flamboyant and, because my brief was to boost libraries, I missed the opportunity to compare perspectives – she’s but twelve days older than I, and also colonial born.
Right up my street, as a vintage car enthusiast, was the charismatic Val Biro and his marvellous prop, Gumdrop, the 1932 Austin Heavy Twelve-Four that not only starred in his picturebooks for children but was the same model my grandfather once owned. Biro, a Hungarian, used to drive Gumdrop from his home in Buckinghamshire to give recitals to schoolchildren. I intercepted them on the road into Gloucester and led him to the Council’s grubby if efficient garage outside Shire Hall, the car’s overnight accommodation, the next day accompanying them to several events, chatting together about cars, a word or two on books. He said because he kept Gumdrop on the road, refurbishing in turn chassis, engine and bodywork, it remained utterly reliable, unlike the exotic vehicles that were towed to car meets on trailers.
Jilly Cooper made the second biggest impression. She’d agreed to launch World Book Day or Libraries Week or some such in about 1990 and I collected her from her Cotswolds home, meeting her dogs and her husband Leo and drinking a cup of tea before chauffeuring her by Austin Maestro to Gloucester City Hall. Being a cultural snob, I was in the tricky position of having admired her collected journalism but having only skim-read a couple of her novels. No problem: what was I reading? she asked. Iris Murdoch. And she, too, was a Murdoch fan.
At that time Jilly was a fixture on TV and, as this was just a local affair, I was surprised to see her growing increasingly nervous. It was no act. What should she say? she asked. Would it do if she said this, or that? And did I have any suggestions? She seemed genuinely reassured by my witterings about the role of libraries in the preservation of civilisation. At HQ I introduced her to the assembled bigwigs. However, as the moment for her speech drew nigh she asked for a room on her own. She was tense, stuttering slightly. Struggling to compose herself. She must, she said, be left alone for a bit. I took pleasure in turfing the deputy director out of his office. Ten minutes later Jilly appeared and, calm and incisive and amusing, presented her speech. Afterwards she charmed the 101-year-old “oldest reader” and six-week-old “youngest” and everyone else at the reception. Librarians, as so often, had been done proud by one of their authors.
Naturally I mentioned in passing to my friends my little encounter with Jilly, and received the most unfair and unkind teasing from one and all. I said then and I repeat it now, no, I was not, strictly speaking, in love.
When I was Librarian of Bradley Stoke Library I secured, for a book week, the perfect visiting author. Lisa Kopper is an accomplished American artist and she writes and illustrates picturebooks, and her heroine was Daisy the Bull Terrier. See what I mean by perfect? Lisa was artist in residence and caretaker at Acton Court, a Tudor manor house once visited by Heny VIII and Anne Boleyn that happens to stand halfway between Bradley Stoke and my home. (So well did the situation suit her that she’s still there.) Sadly, Daisy had passed over but her daughter Dolores was free.
And it was my responsibility to entertain Dolores after her turn – a small walk in the little thicket behind the library. On a hot day when all a dog wants is to lie down and pant in the shade. Now, bull terriers are very stubborn, and, when they don’t want to go back into a hot building, they refuse to budge. A bitch weighs about 25 kg and the distance I had to carry Dolores, a floppy dead weight, was a back-breaking couple of hundred metres.

Digby is the author of the biography of Sir John Christopher Willoughby.